[erlang-questions] Why do "interface to language X" projects all seem to die out?

[Daniel Goertzen]

I think you are correct that these solutions are rarely needed.  As author
of NIFPP I see very little traffic at
https://github.com/goertzenator/nifpp which
gives me the impression that few people use it.

Also there are multiple paths to integration (ports vs c-node vs NIFs) so
this maybe creates fragmentation and further reduces traction for any one
project.  The EPI project you pointed out deals with EI which is completely
orthogonal to NIFPP.

And another reason is tooling.  Do I need to jury rig a weird build system
to make this thing go, or will it just work with rebar/erlang.mk?  If it's
too much hassle to use, then I'll just skip it.  This is an area I've been
trying to improve for Rust (https://github.com/goertzenator/rust.mk)



On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 9:18 AM Matthias Lang <matthias@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Pretty much all of the "not built in to OTP" ways to connect to other
> languages seem to have died, i.e.
>
>    - EPI (C++). Last commit 2009.
>    - py_interface (Python). Last commit 2014. Freshest of the lot.
>    - edtk (C). Last release 2007.
>    - dryverl (C). Last release 2008.
>    - erlua (Lua). Project page dead. Author's email is dead.
>    - erlualib (last commit 2010). Github-linked company page dead.
>
> Can anyone offer some experiences or ideas why?
>
> Could it be that these types of solutions are rarely needed? Maybe
> NIFs are unbeatable for the "narrow interface, no state, high
> performance" cases and port programs with hand-rolled interfaces most
> of the rest.
>
> Matt
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